Pac-Mania

Genre

Arcade Platform

Developer / Publisher

Teque / Grandslam LTD

Released

1988

Media

1 x

Rating

Graphics:

8.0

Sound:

8.0

Gameplay:

9.0

Overall:

8.0

Reviewed by

ndial

Pac-Mania is a "hit" from the coin-ops, converted to almost all 8bit and 16bit computers and consoles. It is one of the best Pac Man games ever created. The NES conversion was developed in 1990 and a year later, its main antagonist's (the Master System) version followed.

Review

STORY / GAMEPLAY Pac Mania brings a different style in Pac Man gaming. The levels and characters are presented in 3D and this time Pac Man can also jump. And believe me this jump can save you from hard situations. But Pac Man must watch out for ghosts that also have jumping abilities. The main goal of the game is to swallow all the dots and complete the level. The funny ghosts now hover in the air instead of...walking. Dots and energy pellets hang in midair. In addition, Pac-Man is granted with a new power: He can jump up and over ghosts! There's also a use a Pac Booster that lets him move at super-speeds. You'll love the new challenging levels - they are available in so many mind-boggling shapes and they'll surely turn you into a certified Pac-Maniac! What a simple, addictive and excellent game to play indeed!

GRAPHICS / SOUND The Amiga conversion of Pac Mania features cute, colorful graphics and innovative level design and concept, all taken from the original arcade. It features a quite large low resolution screen (340 x 272 pixels) compared to the Atari ST counterpart (320 x 200 overall but with only 176 x 200 pixels of playing area)! The Amiga offers 32 colors on-screen of which the first 8 colors are for the background layer, the next 8 are for the foreground and the final 16 are for the sprites. The Amiga's sound is awesome, featuring a few nicely composed tunes taken directly from the original, along with a number of sampled sound effects.

COMPARISON Comparably, the Acorn Archimedes version runs in 16 colors but the graphics look and play equally good with the Amiga, while the Atari ST version runs in 16 colors but the limitations of its graphics hardware make the game visually much inferior). Although the Amiga conversion looks and plays great, the Sharp X68000 is the best of all 16bit home computer conversions, as it is identical to the arcade.

Amiga 500/500+

CPU: Motorola MC68000 7.16 MHzMEMORY: 512KB of Chip RAM (OCS chipset - A500), 512 KB of Slow RAM or Trapdoor RAM can be added via the trapdoor expansion, up to 8 MB of Fast RAM or a Hard drive can be added via the side expansion slot. The ECS chipset (A500+) offered 1MB on board to 2MB (extended) of Chip RAM.GRAPHICS: The OCS chipset (Amiga 500) features planar graphics (codename Denise custom chip), with up to 5 bit-planes (4 in hires), allowing 2, 4, 8, 16 and 32 color screens, from a 12bit RGB palette of 4096 colors. Resolutions varied from 320x256 (PAL, non-interlaced, up to 4096 colors) to 640x512 (interlace, up to 4 colors). Two special graphics modes where also included: Extra Half Bright with 64 colors and HAM with all 4096 colors on-screen. The ECS chipset models (Amiga 500+) offered same features but also extra high resolution screens up to 1280x512 pixels (4 colors at once).SOUND: (Paula) 4 hardware-mixed channels of 8-bit sound at up to 28 kHz. The hardware channels had independent volumes (65 levels) and sampling rates, and mixed down to two fully left and fully right stereo outputs